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It's the most famous Bond car of them all, but is it any good? Andrew Frankel tries the iconic Aston Martin DB5

Goldfinger was neither the first Bond movie nor the first movie to feature Bond in a car but, if you’ll forgive the liberty, I think we can all manage without the Chevrolet Bel Air from Dr Nodelaying us further here. Or for that matter the same maker’s C30 truck in which he was pursued by a helicopter in From Russia With Love.

So it’s the Aston Martin DB5 to which we now turn, as much a part of Bond as a dry Martini, a Walther PPK and a ghastly sense of entitlement around women.

It would be fascinating to see what difference it would have made to Aston Martin had Eon Productions not slipped the sleuth behind the three-spoked steering wheel of the DB5. Maybe its future would have even brighter, but I doubt it. More likely it would not be here at all, for there were times in the Seventies and Eighties when, even with the Bond connection, the company was not expected to survive. But survive it did and, I am sure, at least in part thanks to this car. Or at least its association with the bloke who drove it.

So I think I’ll do the difficult bit now and get it out of the way first. The DB5 is a good car. A genuine great you might say on a sunny day. But a landmark driver’s car? Only if you measure such things by their iconography. In reality its appeal lies in other areas.

The DB5 is not and was never intended to be a sports car. Like the DB4 that preceded it, the DB5 was part of a new generation of softer, more user-friendly Aston Martins. The larger, flabbier DB6 that replaced it extended the approach still further.

The interior of the Aston Martin DB5 is as beautifully crafted as it is tastefulCredit:
Andrew Crowley

Unlike the DB6, though, the DB5 has a shape that retains its ability to knock the air from your lungs. In its Superleggera bodywork it is one of the two greatest looking Astons ever conceived, the other being the similar but more pugilistic DB4GT.

Nor, even after the exterior, does the interior disappoint. You can tell why Aston traditionalists considered the upstart Jaguar E-type’s racy cabin what Jeeves would describe as “a trifle sudden”. In the DB5 lies centuries of English tradition re-imagined for the automotive world. There is no shiny aluminium in here, no platoon of dials marching across the dashboard nor, the horror of it, holes in the spokes of the steering wheel. There’s wood, just a touch of chrome, the finest leather and that’s about it. And it’s spacious. Not for Aston Martin the cramped confines of traditional sports cars. There’s legroom aplenty and all the headroom you could wish for, even without the ejector seat.

Today I am driving James Bond’s actual DB5, which is one reason it’s insured for £3 million. Were it the original Goldfinger car it would be worth far more even than that. Instead, it’s the one used for M’s one way trip to Scotland in Skyfall. And if you’re wondering why it’s not full of bullet holes, the DB5 that got shot to pieces at the end of the film was mercifully a 3D-printed scale model.

Back in the real DB5, its 4.0-litre, six-cylinder, twin cam engine offers an exquisite, profoundly cultured yet distant thunder. The gear lever slides effortlessly into the first of its five ratios and as you lift the clutch and glide forward, the sense of occasion is palpable.

Credit:
EPA

The DB5 does not, however, encourage you to drive fast in the same way as the arriviste E-type begs you to kick your foot to the floor at every opportunity. It’s the difference between downing a pint of ale in your local and sipping a glass of the finest malt in the drawing room: both are British to their boots and wonderful in their own way, but one is to be enjoyed to the full there and then, the other to sit back and savour over time. The DB5 is so quiet, comfortable and relaxing it’s no surprise that Aston Martin never considered making a racing version; it’s just not that kind of car.

Don’t misunderstand me, the DB5 is a quick car, genuinely capable of over 140mph. And let’s not dwell too much on the fact the E-type was at least as quick and - yes really - half the price.

The difference was with the Jag it was always about how fast you were going, with the Aston how you were going fast. Which, if you were using it properly, was over long distances, sitting back rather than hunched over the wheel, driving gloves gripping the rim exercising fingertip control and, in Bond’s case, smoking bespoke cigarettes blended for you by Morland & Co of Grosvenor Street.

Should we then be disappointed by the DB5? Surely not, we just need to understand it a little better. It is a car that’s as much about arriving as it is about driving. There’s never been a better way to turn up outside the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, and there probably never will be. The DB5 is at least as much about the car as art, as a fashion statement and an expression of taste, as a device simply to take you from one place to the next. Given Bond’s polymathic tendencies, it probably actually suited his character at least as much as any other car he got to drive.

Which of course is why they worked so well together, something for which all Bond fans should be grateful in general and Aston Martin in particular. It started an association from which the company has benefitted ever since.

Drives of James Bond cars will return

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